As a practicing dumpster diver, this is a topic well familiar to me. Fact is, playing little juvenile mind-games with someone who is probably just using your network connection to check their e-mail is no better than deliberately snapping a load of DVDs before discarding them, or kniving up boxes of food. It's the kind of childishness by which whenever another kid wants to borrow one of your toys, it proves itself the one that you were 'just about to play with'. An unsecure connection is no different than a Wireless Dumpster. Because by not employing so much as a password, you have openly shown a disregard for its 'theft' tantamount to discardation.
Once encrypted or passworded, though, your wireless morsels are shelved all snug indoors, and to use them is inarguably theft. But as long as your actions keep screaming 'Free internet!', I will remorselessly pick from your trash every time.
I came from a school that had a one-laptop-per-child initiative, and *Christ* if it just lead to obscene amounts of distracted students. When you have to sneak a comic book inside your US History text to fuck around in class, only the dedicated few will do so. When fucking around in class, though, becomes as easy and pleasurable as it is having a laptop in front of you, you end up with a classroom environment of mind-shattering counterproductivity. I know I, for one, spent my entire senior year playing online correspondence chess -- and certainly not paying attention.
Though, where this bit of anecdotal evidence fails is this: though I know from pretty-good firsthand experience that the average American student does not want to learn, and will fuck around hard when given a computer, I don't at all know whether the average Indian student, may actually have the drive to take the privelege to learn and make the most of a computer. I'm not going to pretend to have a whit of insight into India's cultural character here.
Either way, though, I really can't see where pen and paper is a worse set of learning tools than is a computer, in the end. Call me a fragile stick-in-the-mud in the path of the Wave of the Future, but ultimately I think it the quality of the teacher and not the gleam of the tool that defines the potential of a given learning situation. So, might not $100 educational subsidies per student yield better results?
Though I'd really like to condemn paying for video-game lessons as modern-day insanity, I'd probably just as soon turn around and be accepting of someone paying money for lessons from a chess coach. And though I'd like to think of chess as a much more noble cause for tutoring than Counter-Strike [It is.], I can't help but cringe at my double standard a little while doing so.
That being, wouldn't it then be possible to subvert your own biometric reading by, say, developing osteoporosis? Or how about by undergoing a heavy weight-training regimen, which is shown to, besides increasing muscle mass and density, increase that of the bones and connective tissues?
Granted, either of these may take a period of years to impact the reading of such a sensor...
Good enough point, but then again, that sort of Wikipedia article manipulation is likely to continue on anyway, and now with even more credibility -- because if it's in the politically neutral wiki, it must be true!
Here's proof that the name change could not have been any less of a publicity success: One already, only a few days after the news broke, gets Google results for 'OMGWTFWII'.
sent by the sexy matadortress
from her Spanish fortress.
[Of course, the film was torturous!]
Lloyd Kaufman's masterpiece
achieving wide release.
Logos in the marquees
said 'Pac-Man', with the C's
rotated ninety degrees.
Troma
had a premiere at the MOMA.
Poloma
wore her signature aroma.
Yo-Yo Ma
said 'Nihoma!'
and had Pan's Evergreen diploma
shown to Williams and Sonoma!
As much as the author comes off at points as a real pompous jerk of an academician, he has some good points in there, and overall, we can blah-blah about this issue in defense of musty intellectualism or in defense of reprehensible grammar, but the decay of the language is real, and is a problem.
Either way, it's reassuring to know that when society collapses, my competitors for what will remain of our precious and scant resources will be primarily overweight, with poor mastery of the written word.
Slashdot Mirror
...or the mythical confectionary cloud-city of Cimmanon, for that matter.
As a practicing dumpster diver, this is a topic well familiar to me. Fact is, playing little juvenile mind-games with someone who is probably just using your network connection to check their e-mail is no better than deliberately snapping a load of DVDs before discarding them, or kniving up boxes of food. It's the kind of childishness by which whenever another kid wants to borrow one of your toys, it proves itself the one that you were 'just about to play with'. An unsecure connection is no different than a Wireless Dumpster. Because by not employing so much as a password, you have openly shown a disregard for its 'theft' tantamount to discardation.
Once encrypted or passworded, though, your wireless morsels are shelved all snug indoors, and to use them is inarguably theft. But as long as your actions keep screaming 'Free internet!', I will remorselessly pick from your trash every time.
Case closed.
I came from a school that had a one-laptop-per-child initiative, and *Christ* if it just lead to obscene amounts of distracted students. When you have to sneak a comic book inside your US History text to fuck around in class, only the dedicated few will do so. When fucking around in class, though, becomes as easy and pleasurable as it is having a laptop in front of you, you end up with a classroom environment of mind-shattering counterproductivity. I know I, for one, spent my entire senior year playing online correspondence chess -- and certainly not paying attention.
Though, where this bit of anecdotal evidence fails is this: though I know from pretty-good firsthand experience that the average American student does not want to learn, and will fuck around hard when given a computer, I don't at all know whether the average Indian student, may actually have the drive to take the privelege to learn and make the most of a computer. I'm not going to pretend to have a whit of insight into India's cultural character here.
Either way, though, I really can't see where pen and paper is a worse set of learning tools than is a computer, in the end. Call me a fragile stick-in-the-mud in the path of the Wave of the Future, but ultimately I think it the quality of the teacher and not the gleam of the tool that defines the potential of a given learning situation. So, might not $100 educational subsidies per student yield better results?
$0.02
Though I'd really like to condemn paying for video-game lessons as modern-day insanity, I'd probably just as soon turn around and be accepting of someone paying money for lessons from a chess coach. And though I'd like to think of chess as a much more noble cause for tutoring than Counter-Strike [It is.], I can't help but cringe at my double standard a little while doing so.
But, ah, this is ridiculous, in its own right.
*Shrug.*
*Clap.*
That being, wouldn't it then be possible to subvert your own biometric reading by, say, developing osteoporosis? Or how about by undergoing a heavy weight-training regimen, which is shown to, besides increasing muscle mass and density, increase that of the bones and connective tissues?
Granted, either of these may take a period of years to impact the reading of such a sensor...
The joy of my world is Paul Barman.
...how the hell did Michael Crichton work his way up there with Albert Einstein as an example of an intellectual ideal?
I ask honestly -- this strikes me as more curious than anything else.
This thing is fascinating to watch fly. Like a starched and frantic sparrow.
I can already see the anti-dogmatic Yoism breakoff religion: Yoanitarian Yoaniversalism.
Good enough point, but then again, that sort of Wikipedia article manipulation is likely to continue on anyway, and now with even more credibility -- because if it's in the politically neutral wiki, it must be true!
Good night, sweet Hubble. And a flight of angels sing thee to thy rest.
Kudos to you, sir.
Pitch? Yaw? What the government needs to pilot this thing manually is a Wiimote!
"What's curious about that? If you want a quiet building, I'd think you'd want to hire a guy who's an expert in sound and architecture."
Seems they got off on entirely the wrong foot with head project architect Donna Clare, then.
...Really.
Five dollars would be low? Call me naive, but that seems like the high-end price to me.
Here's proof that the name change could not have been any less of a publicity success: One already, only a few days after the news broke, gets Google results for 'OMGWTFWII'.
[FIBONACCI!]
It was an action flick.
Pan-Man kicked backwards
attackers
sent by the sexy matadortress
from her Spanish fortress.
[Of course, the film was torturous!]
Lloyd Kaufman's masterpiece
achieving wide release.
Logos in the marquees
said 'Pac-Man', with the C's
rotated ninety degrees.
Troma
had a premiere at the MOMA.
Poloma
wore her signature aroma.
Yo-Yo Ma
said 'Nihoma!'
and had Pan's Evergreen diploma
shown to Williams and Sonoma!
As much as the author comes off at points as a real pompous jerk of an academician, he has some good points in there, and overall, we can blah-blah about this issue in defense of musty intellectualism or in defense of reprehensible grammar, but the decay of the language is real, and is a problem. Either way, it's reassuring to know that when society collapses, my competitors for what will remain of our precious and scant resources will be primarily overweight, with poor mastery of the written word.